Shaokai Ye

Multi-animal pose estimation, identification and tracking with DeepLabCut

Jessy Lauer, Mackenzie Mathis, Alexander Mathis, Tanmay Nath, Steffen Schneider, Shaokai Ye

Estimating the pose of multiple animals is a challenging computer vision problem: frequent interactions cause occlusions and complicate the association of detected keypoints to the correct individuals, as well as having highly similar looking animals that interact more closely than in typical multi-human scenarios. To take up this challenge, we build on DeepLabCut, an open-source pose estimation toolbox, and provide high-performance animal assembly and tracking-features required for multi-animal scenarios. Furthermore, we integrate the ability to predict an animal's identity to assist tracking (in case of occlusions). We illustrate the power of this framework with four datasets varying in complexity, which we release to serve as a benchmark for future algorithm development. DeepLabCut is extended to enable multi-animal pose estimation, animal identification and tracking, thereby enabling the analysis of social behaviors.

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

Towards Robust Vision Transformer

Yuan He, Shaokai Ye

Recent advances on Vision Transformer (ViT) and its improved variants have shown that self-attention-based networks surpass traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in most vision tasks. However, existing ViTs focus on the standard accuracy and computation cost, lacking the investigation of the intrinsic influence on model robustness and generalization. In this work, we conduct systematic evaluation on components of ViTs in terms of their impact on robustness to adversarial examples, common corruptions and distribution shifts. We find some components can be harmful to robustness. By leveraging robust components as building blocks of ViTs, we propose Robust Vision Transformer (RVT), which is a new vision transformer and has superior performance with strong robustness. Inspired by the findings during the evaluation, we further propose two new plug-and-play techniques called position-aware attention scaling and patch-wise augmentation to augment our RVT, which we abbreviate as RVT*. The experimental results of RVT on ImageNet and six robustness benchmarks demonstrate its advanced robustness and generalization ability compared with previous ViTs and state-of-the-art CNNs. Furthermore, RVT-S* achieves Top-1 rank on multiple robustness leaderboards including ImageNet-C, ImageNet-Sketch and ImageNet-R.

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2022

Adversarial Laser Beam: Effective Physical-World Attack to DNNs in a Blink

Yuan He, Shaokai Ye

Though it is well known that the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) degrades under certain light conditions, there exists no study on the threats of light beams emitted from some physical source as adversarial attacker on DNNs in a real-world scenario. In this work, we show by simply using a laser beam that DNNs are easily fooled. To this end, we propose a novel attack method called Adversarial Laser Beam (AdvLB), which enables manipulation of laser beam's physical parameters to perform adversarial attack. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in both digital- and physical-settings. We further empirically analyze the evaluation results and reveal that the proposed laser beam attack may lead to some interesting prediction errors of the state-of-the-art DNNs. We envisage that the proposed AdvLB method enriches the current family of adversarial attacks and builds the foundation for future robustness studies for light.

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2021

QAIR: Practical Query-efficient Black-Box Attacks for Image Retrieval

Yuan He, Jinfeng Li, Hang Su, Shaokai Ye

We study the query-based attack against image retrieval to evaluate its robustness against adversarial examples under the black-box setting, where the adversary only has query access to the top-1 ranked unlabeled images from the database. Compared with query attacks in image classification, which produce adversaries according to the returned labels or confidence score, the challenge becomes even more prominent due to the difficulty in quantifying the attack effectiveness on the partial retrieved list. In this paper, we make the first attempt in Query-based Attack against Image Retrieval (QAIR), to completely subvert the top-1 retrieval results. Specifically, a new relevance-based loss is designed to quantify the attack effects by measuring the set similarity on the top-1 retrieval results before and after attacks and guide the gradient optimization. To further boost the attack efficiency, a recursive model stealing method is proposed to acquire transferable priors on the target model and generate the prior-guided gradients. Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed attack achieves a high attack success rate with few queries against the image retrieval systems under the black-box setting. The attack evaluations on the real-world visual search engine show that it successfully deceives a commercial system such as Bing Visual Search with 98% attack success rate by only 33 queries on average.

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2021